A Fox News poll completed last week, the day before Politico published a draft majority opinion indicating that the Supreme Court will soon overturn Roe v. Wade, found that just 27% of respondents favored that outcome. Yet 54% thought their own states should ban abortion after 15 weeks of gestation — the very policy at issue in the case before the Court.
A sizable number of the respondents evidently did not realize that a 15-week ban is inconsistent with Roe, and similar anomalies in other surveys suggest such confusion is common. At the same time, polling data indicates that Americans’ opinions about abortion are more diverse and nuanced than Roe’s supporters frequently imply.
